Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Thursday, 21st August 2008

SecondLife rolls out Mono-powered servers. Most of the work on this was done in Linden Lab’s Brighton UK office. If you’re interested in Mono and want to live in Brighton, they’re hiring!

# 9:45 am / jimpurbrick, lindenlab, migueldeicaza, mono, secondlife

querySelectorAll in Firefox 3.1. John Resig benchmarks the various JavaScript libraries’ support for querySelelectorAll, and finds an impressive 2-6x performance improvement over native DOM traversal. It’s worth clicking through to John’s experimental plugin for adding support to jQuery, which does a clever trick using __proto__ to convert the collection returned by querySelectorAll in to a jQuery object in browsers that support it.

# 9:50 am / firefox, javascript, john-resig, jquery, proto, queryselectorall, selectors

Unfortunately, we're not cool enough to run on your OS yet. We really wish we had a version of Photosynth that worked cross platform, but for now it only runs on Windows.

Install Photosynth page

# 10:07 am / copywriting, microsoft, photosynth, windows

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS). EC2 just got a whole lot more useful—you can now create “block level storage volumes” (think virtual hard drives) and mount them to an EC2 instance for real persistent storage—but because they’re virtual you can clone them, snapshot them and benefit from automatic replication.

# 10:15 am / amazon, ebs, ec2

Package Management Sudoku. “A package management system that can solve Sudoku based on package dependency rules is not something that I think would be useful or worth having”—like a red flag to a bull.

# 7:09 pm / apt, debian, funny, sudoku

Persistent Django on Amazon EC2 and EBS—the easy way. Useful tutorial on getting Django up and running on EC2 with EBS for a persistent PostgreSQL database.

# 9:32 pm / amazon, aws, django, ebs, ec2, postgresql, python

django-timezones. Models, form fields and a template filter for dealing with timezones in Django.

# 11:18 pm / django, python, timezones